off the topic

Hi kiwicol,

http://www.solarshop.com.au/government grants page.htm

This may be of use. I can only think it would be good and am seriously thinking the same.
Best of luck with it.

Rgds

nev

Hi Col, I do not have first hand experience with what you are thinking of doing re. solar. I did hear somewhere in the media a couple of weeks back that the buy back system is not worth the effort as it would take too long in time to make it really worth your while.So it may pay you to look into it a fair bit before you put out your hard earned $'s.
Bob. :)

Been here done this.

No I have not converted my house to solar, but was thinking about this a while ago. After even rough calculation it seems that you can recover your investment only in 10 years (very optimistic calculations BTW). And it still would require some maintenance cost (batteries replacement for example). So unless you *COMLETELLY* sure that you will stay in the same house for 20 years, I would say no.

Cheers
Serg

kiwicol,
I live on a rural residential acrerage and I thought it was a good idea, initially.

I did some research on the fors and against from the point of view that it would provide my house with power 24/7, I wouldn't have to use grid power or if I did it would be very little. Any excess power I had would go into the grid and I would receive some sort of payment for the power that I contributed into the grid.

However to do this I would also need a good set of batteries connected to an inverter to supply 240v to the house. That would be the only way that my house would be able to operate off solar power 24/7 for a majority of the time. The way I saw it is if you don't have the solar panels connected to a good battery system then the only time you would get benefit is between the hours of 10.00am and 2.00pm each day when the panels are producing max capacity, the rest of the time you'd be using the grid.

So the costing exercise I did made the idea very expensive and I figured it was far cheaper to use grid power in the long term. I didn't believe you'd ever get your money back and the govt incentive was really a token measure.

I was talking to one of my neighbours a few weeks ago and he had looked into it as well and came up with the same conclusion as me.

You really need to work out the total power needs of all your appliances and when you start adding washing machines, freezers, fridges and in my case a water pump you need a fairly big system.

Anyway, I decided not to do it for the reasons mentioned I hope it helps. If you didn't intend to be fully self sufficient it may be for you but make sure you go into it thoroughly.

No first hand knowledge here either I'm afraid, though my sister is presently building a house across the road, completely independent of the grid.

Because of the cost of connecting to the grid, which pretty much equals the cost of purchasing and installing the solar system, it is well worth it for them.

She commented last week that they're getting the application in pretty smartly as the existing funding is running out, and no clear indication has been given by the new govt as to whether they will extend/modify/end the subsidy.

For what it's worth, with the carbon trading circus path this country is heading down, I can't see electricity staying this cheap for much longer. Might affect the economics of the venture!

No first hand experience, but I did spend considerable time in a previous job researching said for a project I was working on.

Google: Remote Area Power Supply (or RAPS) Lots and lots of info, especially australian based.

Here is the link to a fed government site, which will give you a bit of info:RAPS info

It is a good platform. There used to be (and may still be) government subsidies available for those making the 'green choice', they used to be in the visinity of $7000, which on a $16,000 system, makes it quite a reasonable investment

Good luck, plan to do the same in the future (and have been wanting to for a while), but probably on the next house when it can be set up to suite from the start.

Sustainable House link

Guy who put this house together is called Michael Mobbs. House is located about 5km out of Sydney cbd. You are bound to find something useful in the book.

Good luck.

Jack

Hope to sell up over the next year or two and build on one of our blocks.

It would have cost $46,000 to get grid power on 6 years ago... don't know about now.. so we are looking into solar and maybe even wind power.

Keep us posted on how you go. Good luck.

Cheers Royce

It would be a fun project Kiwicol , but only viable if your mission was to connect a solar power house to the grid.

I took a very practical approach.

I had a mission to make a low running cost house in the bush
and in surveying the resource base available I noted that I had an inexhaustible supply of firewood.

Hence the stratergy I implemented was to completely ignore all solar devices like even the now common solar boosted hot water services and instead use things like wood burning heaters that excepted longer logs (hence less cutting) and to back this up
with high levels passive insulation and double glazing etc.

For power - due to quirks in our electricity supply rules we get electricity off-peak at about 1/4 the price of on-peak.

I then developed battery bank systems which would then charge from the mains off peak.

I.E. The essential stratergy I used was to time shift the electricity supply.